ANNA CODDINGTON: Giving Myself Permission To Be Wordy
An interview by Jessie Moss.
Anna Coddington’s new album ‘Beams’ has been released, and as such you can now find her touring the country.
Beams is a beautifully woven album, co-produced with Lips, that gives light and voice to some political threads as well as the essential nuts and bolts of life that hold everything together.
In this album Anna explores new sounds – it is percussive and sonically textured. The production is as adventurous as the many spaces and places the songs take us. From the multiple identities we all hold to the rights of indigenous peoples around the world, Beams has something for us all.
Before Anna set off on tour, she caught up with Jessie Moss to discuss how Beams came to be and what it means to her…
Kia ora Anna! Your tour has started. Who have you got in the band?
Mike Hall plays bass, Fen Ikner from Lips is on drums – he was one of the producers on the album with Steph Brown, also of Lips. Joel Mulholland is playing guitar except for Wellington and Paekākāriki where we have Ryan Prebble filling in.
Ohh flash!
I know. A very flash band, it humbles me.
Is this the same band you’ve recorded the album with?
The album was recorded between Lips and myself. We did it all. Just swapping around, Fen played drums although I played drums on one song. We kept some of the programming that I’d done. Me and Fen took turns on guitar and there are a couple of songs with my bass playing. Fen and Steph did all the keys and synths.
Production wise, Beams is a bit of a departure from your previous three albums. I want to talk about the production first as it pops so much. When I heard Lips were involved, I was like ‘that makes heaps of sense’…
It makes heaps of sense! The music they make is at once weird, melodic, beautiful and strange. They bring elements of that and then my own style which is more song, melody and story based. The record is a clear blending of those.
Your song base is simple in a way, but there is so much freedom as well that this production brings, which is really open. A real flow and unconstrained feel to it.
In part that is just the way we recorded it. We did it at their house. They have kids as well. I would drop my boys off at kōhanga and kura and then drive over the harbour bridge to their place and we would just hang out and make music from 10 till 2:30 and then pick up our kids. We still talk about this and reflect on it as the best time because it was three friends hanging out and making music which is what we love to do. I loved working with them because we didn’t agonise over it.
Fen comes from a punk DIY background working in studios and building microphones and Steph has always been very DIY and indie, like me. There was less finikyness about sounds. We had the freedom of not paying for a studio. We just had fun, sticking microphones in front of things and pressing record basically. ‘Does it sound good, yeah it sounds good, press record’. It was about having fun and not agonising and I think that is what you hear.
That sense of fun comes out in the music, it’s so sparkly. There is also so much depth and texture to it.
A lot of that is Steph as she is such a guru with the synth sounds, the arrangements and the parts. Even recording the vocals with them was great because I wanted to be directed. It’s so easy to do one hundred takes, to try and get it perfect, you know. You start being your own worst critic. Trying to eliminate every flat or sharp note and to start worrying about the wrong things. It was good because we didn’t want to do one hundred takes because we only had our little windows of time. More time getting the spirit of it right, the right feeling rather than the perfect take.
A theme throughout that springs out to me, is one of ‘enoughness’.
Yes, enoughness!
When you describe the windows of time to record and the simplicity of that. It comes out in the sound as ‘it works, it sounds good, and we’re done’.
That’s it! A lot of the songs themselves are about that as well ‘oh well, I’m not perfect’.
I also hear themes based in the ordinary and even the mundane. Family, humanism, the unseen and unpaid, and that’s what life is?
That’s what a life is, and it’s great. Your life can’t just be the highlights. In four years between my last album and this one, this is what my life was. Two very small kids and a lot of domestic grind. I literally had nothing else to write about. I wasn’t doing anything else. I still had a cool and interesting life.
That’s what it came down to for me, being a mum and a mature woman in the music industry. It is really hard to fight that feeling of ‘Ah, I’m not interesting, or I’m not cool, I’m just a Mum’. That was why I didn’t even want to make another record but I ended up with all these songs, and I was like ‘I’m fucken’ making this record because this is what life is, this is what people are.
And we do have a real depth of feelings and emotions going on way deeper than what you traditionally hear about in pop music. The real stuff of life is so much more tumultuous than that in my experience and worth writing about and listening to.
The musical transition from the parent-based content of ‘Magnesium and Coffee’ into ‘Dive’ is so clever. ‘Dive’ being an ode to your relationship – that’s what I’ve understood?
Yeah that’s what it is.
‘I’m still here with you and I’m committed and it’s hard work’.
‘And we are swimming for our lives’. I’m glad you read it like that.
Do you think that some of these themes are quite particular to being a Mum and a musician, or being a Woman? Is it any different in that regard, the unseen nature of it all.
Identity crisis is a big theme in Beams which can apply to anyone. I know male parents who have similar experiences, anyone in that primary caregiver role trying to spin all those plates. It’s specifically for the mums if I’m honest, but for anyone it resonates with. That is what I was living, mum-life in the context of the patriarchy. The identity crisis and trying to be everything to everyone but still wanting to be myself.
Gaining a new identity. An evolving process that you are trying to understand while it’s happening?
Totally. The interesting thing for me is that becoming a parent helped me to reach into old identities. Particularly my Māoritanga. Our journey with kōhanga and kura forced me to really dive into that part of my identity which was a really great thing.
In ‘Night Class’ and ‘Remember Me’ you go deep on an intergenerational level. These are tear jerkers. However, while listening to the mean groove in Night Class, I imagine you sauntering around a 90’s restaurant, leaning on tables and crooning.
Yeah, yeah! That was kinda deliberate, as it was a heavy kaupapa for me. Because I had been living it, going to Te Reo Māori night classes and struggling with the identity aspects. Watching some of my classmates really struggle with how difficult they were finding that journey, being Māori. It was heartbreaking at times.
I needed that song to be accessible and listenable and that is why it is so light musically. It’s so white and jaunty. I thought if I gave it a heavy melody it would have been almost unlistenable. I needed to balance it like that. It is a play on colonisation too because I’m so Pākehā in many ways. The way I’ve been brought up and the way I live, even the music that I make and the music that I listen to was generally so white up until recently. That is another layer to the song. All about that rub between two parts of my identity.
During the first half of ‘Remember Me’ I was thinking ‘no, DO remember her this way’, then towards the end of the song – you sing just that’…
That song is about me feeling like this grumpy mum doing chores, ‘I don’t want them to remember me like that’ but actually I say I do all of this out of love and that’s what family life is. Yes, remember all of it. When you become a parent it makes you see yourself in terms of whakapapa. Yes, you are an individual but you are also just one point in a long line that stretches back and will stretch forward. That is quite humbling and also really reassuring.
I feel excited for your kids, being able to listen to this music when they are grown. It’s a huge gift for them.
They love the song ‘Beams’ because I told them it was about them. When they first heard it, they sat really quietly with amazed looks on their faces, they were really touched and I’ve never seen them react to my music like that before.
It is an easy first favourite on the album. I love the understated vocals with Louis Baker, all the unison singing. How was that process of collaboration?
It started as a writing project, an exercise. The original demo was written to a brief. I came back to it and wrote a second verse when my family went out on a boat on lake Coniston in England. The lake was reflecting the mountains around it like a mirror image, like a dream.
It was Steph and Fen’s idea to include it as a duet on the album and Louis was the first person I thought of, I just love his voice. I was thinking ‘He won’t want to do it, he’s too cool’. But he said yes which I was thrilled about. We sent him the track and left it to him to write something new or do ad-libs. We changed the key for him which made it really high for me as we wanted the chorus to be sung in unison. We did it all remotely like that. It was more of a process than the other songs. It wasn’t written all at once and was more laboured but it paid off. We just loved the hook so much, we wanted to make it work.
I’ve seen several people shazaming it.
It didn’t occur to me that people would shazam it!
Well, it’s stopping people in their tracks.
Sometimes labouring over a song is a necessary part of the process. I’m a strong believer in trying different ways to create a song. If I do the same thing, I get the same kind of songs. Setting poetry to music a couple of times has been informative. You can learn so much doing things like that.
There is something about the unexpectedness of the production and your process that makes me think of Fiona Apple’s very percussive ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’.
I love that. My first instrument was the drums. I started when I was 11. Drums and rhythm remain an important part of music for me. If the drummer isn’t on, I find it hard to enjoy a band.
One thing I was conscious about was letting go of some of the purposeful writing I’d been doing of pop music. I have been listening to Phoebe Bridges and Lana Del Ray’s recent stuff which have longer forms, but they are less strictly structured, and quite wordy. I find it difficult writing short pop songs because I am really wordy. I was listening to stuff like that to give myself permission to say what I needed to say and write how I want.
Listening to ‘We See You’ I find myself trying to pick out all the individual sounds. Can you unpack it for us?
That song was inspired by Ihumātao and the night the police went in under the cover of darkness after being so tau and friendly during the day. It made me feel angry. ‘You think you can do that without people seeing it and getting upset about it?’. It applies to lots of shitty behaviour. The demo was simply the bassline and the thumping drums. We liked that base so much it was difficult to add to it, anything that took up too much space didn’t work and took away from the wairua and the hot energy of the song. We tried a bunch of stuff, there is a rubber band in there! Then Black Lives Matter happened and I realised it’s more universal, I wanted it to apply broadly.
It makes me think of SAULT’s ‘Black Is’.
That is the best compliment for me, those albums are mind benders for me. It’s like they have reached into your brain and heart and put it into music.
There is something specific about Beams, SAULT and Fiona Apple’s music in giving voice to living under many forms of oppression, which can be really hard to express sometimes. When you are talking about being wordy, I think ‘how else can this minute stuff be described’?
For me that is why I wanted to give myself permission to be wordy. It makes it more genuine and affecting. The more you can sell it as a genuine human experience, the more it can resonate.
Anna Coddington is midway through her NZ Tour, with dates in Christchurch (Tonight!), Nelson, Picton, Paekākāriki and the final night in Wellington on the 10th April. Tickets to all shows are still available but are selling fast, so don’t hesitate! Beams is currently available via all streaming platforms, with a special limited edition CD available via Bandcamp.
Image Credits: Feature Image courtesy of LOOP / Doug Peters. Live Images courtesy of Loud Noise Media / Keelan Walker.
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